| Ten Million Homes_Yeagyung Kim (Art Critic) | |
| Ten Million Homes “Soft Home – Life Inside Time” is 3,196 pieces of me carved into cotton cloths, each piece equal to myself, my body, my home, and my room. This piece of work, with the great amount of time spent on linking the cotton cloths, not the strongest fabric but neither easily tearable, means a lot to me, as it embodies the onerous times of self-repair I had been through. I intend to invite the audience into the times I had lived and share my emotions. They will sit in the Soft Home past the 3,196 sheets of cotton, enjoying their existence and time, and hopefully, heal themselves just as I had healed and rejuvenated myself. In a time where the COVID-19 is threatening and even taking our lives worldwide, I hope this “Soft Home” could become a place of reconciliation and restoration. Jeong Yeon KIM (Artist’s note) Kim Jeong Yeon’s “Soft Home” is an ironic piece. She refers to her ‘home’ back when she started working on this piece as ‘nature’, as her home was being struck by a ‘storm’. In fact, her home was always stormy: her internal conflicts caused by the tension between her and her mother, the familial obstacles she faced upon marriage, and all the Gannansingo 艱難辛苦 (great hardships) of it. This old word is one that I have borrowed to manifest the gravity of Kim’s pain, although no simple terminology would be able to convey it fully. To quote Hannah Arendt, pain is such a thing: incommunicable, especially through words and sentences. There, Kim created her home in silence, to communicate her pain through art. The irony lies within its expression; she did not build a stormy house, but a ‘Soft Home.’ The combination of these two words is clearly an unconscious expression burst out to alleviate the weight upon her life, one that yearns for ‘softness’ over the harsh, stormy reality. ‘Softness’ to Kim is a word that reminds her of healing. “Soft Home” incorporates the times and efforts she spent to heal her broken self, represented by the 3,196 self-portraits. Now, anyone can enter the home. The inside is a space of restoration. This is where Kim ‘greets’ others through her invisible artistic language. It is also ironic that this is also the place of life’s ‘festivals.’ While festivals are places of joy and delight, that is only one aspect of it, as festivals originate from carnivals. According to Mikhail Bakhtin, carnivals are places of existential reincarnation in a communal sense. As such, “Soft Home” is a place folded in on itself, thus letting it open to others, where it is possible to find others’ pains as it embraces that of her own. This dual space allows both the diagnosis and the cure to take place. “Soft Home” is a place made through creating a crease; the four creases merge into one space, one crease. This crease connotes ten million more creases of others’ lives, speaking that her ‘soft home’ is also where others live. Yeagyung Kim (Art Critic) |
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| Restful home-livelife within time | |
<Restful home-livelife within time> symbolizes a house of ten years since marriage. After carving myself into a latex material symbolizing the ten years(3312 days), One by one is myself, my body, home and my room. Long production artwork of attaching rubber latex, which is not strong but is not tearable, was significant as a time to heal a decade of hardship that was never easy. |
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ARTIST Criticism
